When Italy's favourite sons came out to play this week, inviting Italian immigrants living in this Ruhr steel town to bring their children to watch a late-afternoon training session, the first chant that went up from the flag-waving throng celebrated the presence of Gennaro Gattuso. And outside the Trattoria Da Bruno, the most upmarket of the town's many Italian restaurants, a blackboard advertises their speciality of the month: a Pizza Gattuso.

Italy's football fans usually idolise players who ooze style and class. This time, however, their choice is not Francesco Totti or Alessandro Del Piero, the golden boys, or even Fabio Cannavaro, the universally admired captain and linchpin of a defence that has conceded only a single goal in Germany. Their affections have been engaged by the bearded Gattuso, the hard man of the midfield, the terrier, the spoiler, the warrior who embodies the success of Marcello Lippi's squad in overcoming a series of recent events that could have destroyed their will to compete before they had even kicked a ball in the tournament.

Gattuso incarnates the quality known to Italians as grinta, or fighting spirit. As well as acting as a bodyguard to Andrea Pirlo, whose suave passes direct the flow of Italy's play, Gattuso is charged with disrupting the opposition's attacks at source. When Marco Materazzi was asked this week how Italy would cope with the threat of Zinédine Zidane tomorrow, he had no hesitation in announcing their strategy. "Zidane won't be a problem," he said. "We've got Gattuso. He'll stop him."

Yesterday the recipient of the compliment was not so sure. "That's all right for Materazzi," Gattuso replied with a wry smile. "Maybe he thinks he solved his problem. Now I have to cope with it."

He was asked if he would like to swap identities with Zidane, a player at the opposite end of the midfield spectrum. "I like Zidane very much," he replied, "but I accept what God gave me. I don't have as much creativity, but perhaps I can do one or two little things. He's played a lot of matches and he's not so young. Maybe he'll get tired."

If he does, Gattuso won't. The 28-year-old from Calabria runs on an apparently endless supply of energy and an inexhaustible appetite for combat. Italian football has always needed such players, men like Claudio Gentile and Romeo Benetti, who buy the time and space in which the artists can play. Gattuso, whose career includes a spell at Ibrox, is the latest of the line, and his aggression is setting an example to a besieged squad.

Lippi's players arrived in Germany under the cloud of allegations that Juventus, Milan (Gattuso's club), Lazio and Fiorentina had been exerting influence over Serie A's pool of referees. They knew that the clubs were threatened with enforced relegation, and that their personal futures might be affected. Within days came the news that Gianluca Pessotto, a former Juventus player recently appointed the club's general manager, had thrown himself off the office roof and was in a critical condition.

The five Juventus players in the squad were badly affected, and some of them flew to the bedside of the 35-year-old Pessotto. At the end of their next match, a victory over the Czech Republic, the whole team posed for the cameras behind a banner expressing support for their friend. Pessotto is still in a Turin hospital, his condition gradually improving, but the Azzurri seem to have banded together in an attempt to rescue Italian football from intensive care.

To Liam Brady, the great Irish midfielder who played for Juventus in the 1980s, the whole affair has powerful echoes of the 1982 World Cup. That summer Italy arrived in the wake of a match-fixing scandal, received massive amounts of criticism for their early performances, drew strength from adversity and went on to win the final under their shrewd manager, Enzo Bearzot.

"There are a lot of similarities," Brady said yesterday. "After the first round in 1982, the press told the team they were a disgrace to their country and they ought to go straight home. If you play that card right, like Bearzot did, it can be a great thing for team spirit. I would have thought that because the players had nothing to do with the scandal, and were totally blameless in all this, it would have been a great motivation for them. I think Lippi was quick to recognise that and to turn it into a weapon."

This week Lippi said he had not spoken to the squad about the scandal since their departure from Italy. "I don't know whether they've talked about it among themselves," he said. "I've just been talking to them about the games and their opponents. But certainly since the start of this tournament the scandal has provoked a reaction. It's made us stronger. Before we left I warned them that we might face a bad atmosphere, but that's not how it has been and we have shown the world that Italian football is alive and beautiful, even on the moral plane."

Gattuso is one of those who, should his club be relegated, will be the subject of transfer speculation. Juventus may lose an entire cast of top names, including Cannavaro, Gianluca Zambrotta and Gianluigi Buffon, who has recently been questioned about his alleged involvement in an illegal betting operation. Messages are already coming from Fabio Capello, who left Juventus this week, that several of his old players would be welcome to help him rebuild Real Madrid.

"We'll talk about these things after the World Cup," Buffon said yesterday. "We're not affected by what's going on in Italy. I think Juventus's directors should be proud of having so many players in the World Cup final."

To Gattuso, the request by the Italian state prosecutor Stefano Palazzi for Juventus to be demoted to Serie C and for the other three clubs to go down to Serie B was "very, very heavy. Maybe the requests are one thing and the sentences will be another". The transfer market, he said, will have to wait. "I'm just concentrating on the most important match of my life. That's all I want to think about."

Gattuso was prominent among the players who disagreed with the call made by Maurizio Paniz, an MP of Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing Forza Italia party, for a dismissal of all charges if Italy win the World Cup tomorrow. "There shouldn't be an amnesty," Gattuso said. "Those who have committed crimes ought to be punished."

The new commissioner of the Italian Football Association backed him up. "Sporting justice must be done," Guido Rossi wrote in a message acclaiming the semi-final victory over Germany, "and Italy must change."

As they await the tribunal's verdicts, many of Italy's players are wondering what shirts they will be wearing next season. The relief of making it to Berlin, however, appears to have allowed a certain mordant humour to emerge. Before Gattuso went off to yesterday's final training session in Duisburg, he was asked if he had placed a bet on the outcome of the final. "Please," he replied. "I don't want to get a call from Mr Rossi." Not that kind of a call, anyway.